Football fans sacked by Reliant Stadium traffic jams

SNARL SNAFU

Published
5:30 am CDT, Tuesday, August 27, 2002

Officials had a mini-summit meeting of sorts on Monday to sort out what to do about the gigantic traffic jam that marred the inaugural Houston Texans' National Football League game in Reliant Stadium on Saturday night.

The Texans were very nearly shut out on the field, and many of their fans (perhaps as many as 17,000) were shut out of most of the first half of the game, trying to make their way out of the traffic jam and into the stadium.

With another game scheduled Friday night, untangling the snarl snafu is as urgent as protecting the franchise quarterback.

If even a tiny fraction of the effort that went into the inaugural public-relations blitz of the past few months had gone into thinking about the stadium traffic, the problems might have been mitigated.

Houston only has three decades of experience with similar events at the neighboring Astrodome to tell us that 70,000 people descending on the area at the same time would create some kind of gridlock. Some game-goers reportedly took two hours to travel the last three miles to the stadium.

The South Main and Loop 610 South area was cited as the source of most of the tie-up problems that rippled out to surrounding streets. Because traffic backed up farther than experts anticipated, police officers were not deployed in areas where congestion was worst, said officials.

Team and stadium officials are looking hiring more off-duty police officers and using Metro shuttle buses, which the team had previously rejected, to prevent a repeat of Saturday.